


Audiopaper

by HeatedHeadwear (SplickedyHat)



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen, early in series one, mostly just enjoying a concept, slight angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 13:20:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/HeatedHeadwear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ninth and Rose introspective one-shot.  Alien technology and secrets are two things the Doctor seems to love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Audiopaper

The air is spicy here—maybe it’s just this marketplace, but then again maybe it’s the whole planet. Either way, it makes Rose’s eyes water and her nose run. The Doctor (of course) seems completely unaffected. In fact, he keeps taking deep, bolstering breaths of the sort that would be scalding Rose’s sinuses, especially if she had a nose like—

She cuts the thought off short and giggles despite herself.

“What?” says the Doctor, with that hint of mock-indignance he always puts on when he doesn’t know why something’s happening.

“Nothing,” says Rose hurriedly, clasping her hands behind her back and striding ahead of him with a couple of bouncing steps. “Just…alien planets, you know. Still getting used to it.”

He relaxes and catches up to her easily with his usual knack for threading through a crowd. (Rose suspects that although lot of this comes from experience, it’s also due to his height and intimidating features.) And there is a crowd here. Lots of crowds, in fact.

This alien marketplace is reminiscent of London in that respect, albeit with even more local skin colors than London. Sometimes on the same person.

Rose is in the middle of contemplating an alien with leopard-patterned skin and tentacles around its neck when the Doctor exclaims happily and ducks off to one side. Rose turns to see him haggling with a stall owner who is, to her surprise, actually human. The Doctor goes from cheerful to curious to stern as she watches. There are very few people who can stand firm in the presence of the Doctor’s stern face.

Then he’s cheerful again and shakes hands with the disgruntled stall owner. When he turns around, there are two sheets of sky-blue paper in his hands. He passes one to Rose, and starts digging in one of his pockets while she stares at it.

“What’s this?” she tries, knowing already what his answer is going to be.

“Piece of paper!” he says, grinning. “Want a pen?”

Rose knows she’s not going to get a straight answer until whatever he’s waiting for happens. “Uh, yeah. Sure”

The Doctor hauls his arm back out of his leather jacket, where it was buried up to the elbow. He’s holding a quill pen and a stick of charcoal. He hands her the quill.

Rose stares at it. “What do I do with this?”

“Write on the paper, of course!” he says, waving a hand at her with a kind of fond impatience. “Come on, let’s get some food and you can try it out while we’re sitting down.”

Rose would really like some human earth food, but apparently they don’t sell that here. Instead the Doctor buys pasta dishes with unidentifiable pieces of some sort of fish stirred in and something crumbly and white sprinkled on top. The flavor is so fiery that Rose thinks it might be the lone reason for the air’s spiciness. She decides to let her bowl sit in the hope that it will cool (unlikely) and ponders the sky-blue paper.

She has a faint memory of practicing one word in cursive, over and over again. Rose puts the tip of the quill to the paper (apparently it doesn’t need to be dipped in ink) and starts to write Rose.

The moment she moves the pen, there’s a noise like a wet finger running along the rim of a wineglass. She stops. She looks up. The Doctor is grinning. He raises his eyebrows and nods and Rose smiles back at him, shaking her head. She tries again. Rose Tyler.

“It makes a song!” she says, knowing she must sounds like a child to him and equally aware that this is partially why he likes having her along. She tries Jackie Tyler. Mickey Smith. Whole sentences make beautiful, chiming tunes, the paper vibrating under her hand as she writes.

The Doctor’s paper is still empty. After a while, Rose tires of glancing up to see if he’s written anything (he seems more interested in his powdered, fishy, pepper-flavored noodles). She continues to fill up the paper, eventually settling into a kind of rhythm with a kind of diary entry.

It’s only once she has filled every square inch of the paper and begun inspecting her own food that the Doctor picks up his own sheet, propping it against a clipboard he wasn’t carrying a couple of seconds ago. Rose wonders whether it came from his pocket.

She opens her mouth to say something, and then the charcoal stick in his hand starts moving.

About ten seconds later, her mouth is still open and her cold spicy soup sits forgotten on the table in front of her.

The Doctor looks down at his creation with an odd sort of sad half-smile on his angular face. Then he seems to snap out of his reverie, flashing her another, more lively smile. Before he crumples the blue paper into a ball Rose catches a glimpse of a pattern made of a series of rings. And then it’s gone, tossed into one of the incineration receptacles, never to be seen again.

“But…hang on, that was beautiful!” she says, privately adding that “beautiful” doesn’t cover the sound the paper made when the Doctor wrote on it. She can’t even remember the tune now. “Why’d you throw it away?”

He stands up abruptly, still smiling, and says, “Audiopaper! Fantastic stuff, you’ll never believe the way it works. Well, when I say believe…more like understand… How ‘bout I tell you in a way you’ll understand but is totally wrong?”

And then he’s off walking, and she has to run to keep up, never able to get a word in edgewise. And she knows this is one of those things she can’t ask about.

She knows she’d never get an answer.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I'd mark this as Ninth/Rose because I really adore them together, but to be honest it could be read as platonic as well. I'm not really comfortable writing fic for live-action characters, but I felt like this might be an okay way to kick off my AO3 account.


End file.
